Ordinary tweezers are usually not suitable for removing ticks who have embedded themselves into and fixed themselves in the skin of humans or animals. The tick has a mouth which it uses for burrowing its head into the skin. The head is only a few tenths of a millimeter in diameter and is usually relatively rigidly attached to the skin.
The body of the tick is bigger than the head and is the visible part which one can readily grasp with a tweezer or with one's fingers. However, if one tries to pull the tick by merely grasping the body in an effort to remove the tick from the skin, there is a considerable risk that the body will separate from the head of the tick, thus leaving the head in the skin which can cause serious infection, and disease. That risk can be minimized considerably by first turning the tick counter clockwise. With the fingers or with an ordinary tweezer one can, with the same grasp, only rotate a fraction of a turn, which more often than not is insufficient for the tick's head to release its grip. Moreover, if at the end of such a turn one pulls, a great risk still remains that the tick's body will be torn off from the head, which, once again, remains embedded in the skin. In order to be sure to remove the head from the skin as well, one has to rotate the tick's head three to five times around its longitudinal axis. That is, however, impossible to do with the fingers or with an ordinary tweezer without changing the grasp on the tick's head, which then unfortunately, rotates itself back into its original position, with the same inherent problems still remaining. Moreover, if a conventional or ordinary tweezer is employed to accomplish this, the ordinary tweezer still has the disadvantage that the squeezing force can only be regulated in a relatively crude fashion by squeezing the tweezer's legs together with the fingers. The squeezing force can, in that case, be too large, which means that the tweezer will not let go of the tick's body if the head is still too firmly attached to the skin when the pulling is done, once again resulting in the great risk that the tick body will be torn off the head causing considerable further difficulties in grasping the head still embedded in the skin. With these problems in mind, there have been various unsuccessful prior art attempts to provide a satisfactory tweezer type device for removing ticks, such as disclosed, by way of example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,303,268; 4,442,837; and 4,213,460. However, none of these prior art devices has a satisfactory configuration which permits relative ease of reaching a tick's head remaining in the skin while enabling the tick and its head to be grasped with such a predetermined force that the tweezer will lose its grip if the tick's head has not first been loosened by turning. The problems of the prior art are even more acute in humans since ticks usually sit firmer in humans than in animals, and, thus, removal of ticks from humans provides an even greater risk that the head or parts of the tick will remain after tearing off the body with increased risks of infectious disease.
These disadvantages of the prior art are overcome by the present invention which provides a tweezer configuration which makes it possible to avoid the above described difficulties so that one, in a successful manner, can readily remove ticks embedded in the skin of both humans and animals.